Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

When convicts found out that my car was nothing but a 4-door, 6-cylinder Mercedes, they often scorned or pitied me. It was the same with many of the students at Tarkington. I might as well have owned a battered pickup truck.

So I walked that bicycle out of the weeds and onto the steep slope of Clinton Street. I wouldn’t have to pedal or turn a corner in order to deliver myself to the front door of the Black Cat Café. I would have to use the brakes, however, and I tested those. If the brakes didn’t work, I would go off the end of the dock of the old barge terminal and, alley-oop, straight into Lake Mohiga.

I straddled the banana-shaped saddle, which turned out to be surprisingly considerate of my sensitive crotch and hindquarters. Sailing down a hill on that bicycle in the sunshine wasn’t anything like being crucified.

I parked the bike in plain view in front of the Black Cat Café, noting several champagne corks on the sidewalk and in the gutter. In Vietnam they would have been cartridge cases. This was where Arthur K. Clarke had formed up his motorcycle gang for its unopposed assault on Tarkington. The troops and their ladies had first drunk champagne. There were also remains of sandwiches, and I stepped on one, which I think was either cucumber or watercress. I scraped it off on the curbing, left it there for germs. I’ll tell you this, though:

No germ is going to leave the Solar System eating sissy stuff like that.

Plutonium! Now there’s the stuff to put hair on a microbe’s chest.

I entered the Black Cat Café for the first time in my life. This was my club now, since I had been busted down to Townie. Maybe, after a few drinks, I’d go back up the hill and let air out of the tires of some of Clarke’s motorcycles and limousines.

I bellied up to the bar and said, “Give me a wop.” That was what I had heard people down in the town called Budweiser beer, ever since Italians had bought Anheuser-Busch, the company that made Budweiser. The Italians got the St. Louis Cardinals, too, as part of the deal.

“Wop coming up,” said the barmaid. She was just the kind of woman I would go for right now, if I didn’t have TB. She was in her late 30s, and had had a lot of bad luck recently, and didn’t know where to turn next. I knew her story. So did everybody else in town. She and her husband restored an old-time ice cream parlor 2 doors up Clinton Street from the Black Cat Café. But then her husband died because he had inhaled so much paint remover. The germs inside him couldn’t have felt too great, either.

Who knows, though? The Elders of Tralfamadore may have had her husband restore the ice cream parlor just so we could have a new strain of germs capable of surviving a passage through a cloud of paint remover in outer space.

Her name was Muriel Peck, and her husband Jerry Peck was a direct descendant of the first President of Tarkington College. His father grew up in this valley, but Jerry was raised in San Diego, California, and then he went to work for an ice cream company out there. The ice cream company was bought by President Mobutu of Zaire, and Jerry was let go. So he came here with Muriel and their 2 kids to discover his roots.

Since he already knew ice cream, it made perfect sense for him to buy the old ice cream parlor. It would have been better for all concerned if he had known a little less about ice cream and a little more about paint remover.

Muriel and I would eventually become lovers, but not until I had been working at Athena Prison for 2 weeks. I finally got nerve enough to ask her, since she and Jerry had both majored in Literature at Swarthmore College, if either of them had ever taken the time to read a label on a can of paint remover.

“Not until it was much too late,” she said.

Over at the prison I would encounter a surprising number of convicts who had been damaged not by paint remover but by paint. When they were little they had eaten chips or breathed dust from old lead-based pains. Lead poisoning had made them very stupid. They Wéré all in prison for the dumbest crimes imaginable, and I was never able to teach any of them to read and write.

Thanks to them, do we now have germs which eat lead?

I know we have germs which eat petroleum. What their story is, I do not know. Maybe they’re that Honduran gonorrhea.

Jerry Peck was in a wheelchair with a tank of oxygen in his lap at the grand opening of the Mohiga Ice Cream Emporium. But he and Muriel had a nice little hit on their hands. Tarkingtonians and Townies alike were pleased by the decor and the luscious ice cream.

After the place had been open for only 6 months, though, a man came in and photographed everything. Then he pulled out a tape and made measurements which he wrote down in a book. The Pecks were flattered, and asked him if he was from an architectural magazine or what. He said that he worked for the architect who was designing the new student recreation center up on the hill, the Pahlavi Pavilion. The Pahlavis wanted it to have an ice cream parlor identical to theirs, right down to the last detail.

So maybe it wasn’t paint remover that killed Jerry Peck after all.

The Pavilion also put the valley’s only bowling alley out of business. It couldn’t survive on the business of Townies alone. So anybody in this area who wanted to bowl and wasn’t connected to Tarkington had to go 30 kilometers to the north, to the alleys next to the Meadowdale Cinema Complex, across the highway from the National Guard Armory.

It was a slow time of day at the Black Cat Café. There may have been a few prostitutes in vans in the parking lot out back but none inside.

The owner, Lyle Hooper, who was also Chief of the Volunteer Fire Department and a Notary, was at the other end of the bar, doing some kind of bookkeeping. Until the very end of his life, he would never admit that the availability of prostitutes in his parking lot accounted in large measure for the business he did in liquor and snacks, and for the condom machine in the men’s room.

To the Elders of Traffamadore, of course, that condom machine would represent a threat to their space program.

Lyle Hooper surely knew about my sexual exploits, since he had notarized the affidavits in my portfolio. But he never mentioned them to me, or so far as I know to anyone. He was the soul of discretion.

Lyle was probably the best-liked man in this valley. Towmes were so fond of him, men and women alike, that I never heard one call the Black Cat Café a whorehouse. Up on the hill, of course, it was called almost nothing else.

The Townies protected the image he had of himself, in spite of State Police raids and visits from the County Health Department, as a family man who ran a place of refreshment whose success depended entirely on the quality of the drinks and snacks he served. This kindly conspiracy protected Lyle’s son Charlton, as well. Charlton grew to be 2 meters tall, and was a New York State High School All-Star basketball center in his senior year at Scipio High School, and all he ever had to say about his father was that he ran a restaurant.

Charlton was such a phenomenal basketball player that he was invited to try out for the New York Knickerbockers, which were still owned by Americans back then. He accepted a full scholarship to MIT instead, and became a top scientist running the huge subatomic particle accelerator called “the Supercollider” outside Waxahachie, Texas.

As I understand it, the scientists down there forced invisible particles to reveal their secrets by making them go splat on photographic plates. That isn’t all that different from the way we treated suspected enemy agents in Vietnam sometimes.

Have I already said that I threw one out of a helicopter?